


Tooth and Claw

by ShinobiCyrus



Series: Ectober Phanfiction [1]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Ectober (Danny Phantom), Esperanto, Future Fic, Gen, Ghost Hunting, Or - Tucker tries to save the day, Sidekicks, Tucker-centric phic, and probably needs a little saving himself, look out evil! it’s a coward with a guuuun!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 02:36:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28753026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShinobiCyrus/pseuds/ShinobiCyrus
Summary: Being the sidekick sucks. All the responsibilities, none of the super-powered perks. But what else is Tucker supposed to do when he sees a ghost go after some ill-advised midnight jogger? Try to help, or wait for the 'real' hero to show up?"This is a good plan."(It's a terrible plan)
Relationships: Tucker Foley & Wulf
Series: Ectober Phanfiction [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2109018
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Tooth and Claw

**Author's Note:**

> An Event Prompt for Ectober 2017: "TEETH"
> 
> Warnings for monster violence, ectoplasmic gore, and unspeakable crimes against the Esperanto language.

It was probably a bad sign how long it took for Tucker to figure out which of the tech in his bag was beeping. Had to crouch over it on the sidewalk sifting through a tablet, an old phone, his backup battery charger, two different generations of game boys, his _backup_ -backup charger; Sam always warned him he was slowly sliding down a slippery silicon slope into pseudo-hoarding.

He found the culprit near the bottom of the bag: a Fenton ecto-scope tangled up in some old cables for a model of PDA he…didn’t actually own anymore. Sam must never know. 

It was a cobbled-together monster made from grave-robbing radio-shacks and amateur soldering kits. Taking it out of the bag only made it vibrate and beep more urgently. The scope took some finagling with a few stuck knobs and dials before the static on screen resolved into something informative: the pixelated silhouettes of trees and a cold-spot slithering past them in toxic, neon green.

Tucker lowered the scope and squinted down the block. The park was that way. Damn. Rustling through his pockets, he pulled out his main phone and pinged Danny on the secure messenger app they’d set up for Phantom stuff- because it wasn’t paranoia when the government really _was_ hunting you down.

** GROUPCHAT: WHO YA GONNA CALL? ( ~~THE D~~ ) **

> **YOU:** Code Green in the park  
>  **YOU:** class idk whatever the hell OH SHIT THAT’S BIG is  
>  **DANNY:** ok I can be there in 8  
>  **DANNY:** keep your head down till I get there

Tucker typed back ‘You know me,’ and added a '😖' for good measure.

> **DANNY:** 😕  
>  **YOU:** I choose to interpret that as loving concern for my safety ** _  
> _****YOU:** don’t text and fly have you learned nothing from the billboard incident  
>  **YOU:** such a bad role model  
>  **YOU:** Thing of the kids  
>  **YOU:** *think  
>  **YOU** : Plz hurry

Tucker pocketed his phone before Danny remembered the talk-to-text feature. Or if Sam logged on. Like he needed their reminders not to try stuff solo. He was fully capable on standing on a streetcorner like a good sidekick and wait for the big kids to come and-

A scream cut through the night, echoes elongating on concrete and broken asphalt. 

From the park.

Where the monster-ghost was. 

Tucker groaned. “Aw hell,” and ran down the street towards it. 

Being a technophillic pseudo-shut-in whose primary mode of exercise was patrolling haunted warehouses and fleeing for his life, Tucker was pretty unfamiliar with the park. The light from the scattering of streetlamps following the paths was too few and far between, and the shadows from the trees offered too many places for an attack to come from. Honestly, even without the ghost this place was a deathtrap. 

But whatever, he was committed. He had a Fenton wrist blaster raised and trained on anything that sounded bigger than a grasshopper while he followed the chiming ectoscope.

It all resembled a scene from one of Sam’s Femalien movies a little too close for comfort: the squad of buff, hypermasculine space marines of the spacepatriachy, gung-ho and completely unaware how quickly their collective space-asses were about to get wrecked.

He kept walking. The ectoscope pinged faster. Danny said eight minutes, right? And that was…not eight minutes ago, but sooner than it was earlier. All he had to do was rescue the nice human people from being chewtoys and preferably not get full-ghosted himself.

A twig snapped. Tucker almost shot a startled rabbit, eyes shining on the edge of a streetlight. It hopped away until it melted into the long shadows of the mini-woods. 

“This is a good plan,” Tucker decided. Out loud. On the record. 

Further down the path, where the path looped around a copse of trees and the scarce light flickered weakly, Tucker heard another scream. 

He ran towards it. _Look out, creatures of the netherworld, it’s a coward with a guuuun!_

Around the bend, the lights were completely out, smothered and snuffed by a low buzzing hum that smelled like ozone and made the ectoscope sputter into a snowstorm of static. There was still plenty of light to see by. Sick, witch-cauldron green radiating from the ghost swimming ethereally in the air like a giant watersnake, only segmented, SUV-sized, and a head that was more a gaping chasm of sawteeth than actual head. 

That sarlacc mouth was perfectly sized to swallow up a lady in jogger clothes, who was pretty much paralyzed with fear…or maybe it was some kind of hypnotic gaze? Maybe that was what the noise was: lulling the prey just long enough to send them to the Boba-Fett Place. 

Tucker threw the ectoscope aside, braced the arm with the wrist-blaster, and shot right down the thing’s ugly mouth.

The low buzzing in the air cut off into a gurgling screech. It reared up, spitting up ecto-bile and vaporized gullet. Tucker’s next two shots hit along its body, making it spasm mid-air like a breathless fish and crash writhing into the grass. 

“Wha-?” The lady said, either broken by the spell or just plain baffled by daring rescue. Tuck ran up to stand between her and the ghost, blaster at the ready.

“Just go, I’ll hold it off!” Tucker yelled over his shoulder. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be-”

Annnddd she was already gone. Oh wow she could really book it. Guess that explained the jogging shorts. Still. 

“What, not even _half a second_ of hesitation?!” Tucker yelled at the receding sound of her shoes. “I know I told you to run, but jeez, a little concern for- oh _hi_ you’re up.”

The baby shai-hulud had risen back up, not floating but still long enough to cast a shadow over him. From that close, its outraged roar smelled a little like sun-rotted roadkill. 

“Okay, you’re a little mad, I hear you,” Tucker leveled the blaster at it. “But here’s my rebuttal.”

Then the blaster didn’t fire.

Tucker rapidly thumbed the firing switch again. A third time. The blaster shuddered a bit on his wrist, made an sad, tired electric whine. It sounded too much like a whomp whomp on helium. 

“Uh…I don’t suppose you’d let me find someplace to plug this in?” He yelped and dove to the side when the ghost lunged at him. “AH! Guess that’s a ‘no’!”

Oh God how had he thought this was a good plan.

Tucker ran, pulled out every stop he knew from years of tactically fleeing horrifying undead monsters. Thankfully however he’d hurt it before kept it from flying after him, and it didn’t seem smart enough to phase through the trash cans, streetlights, and park benches that got in its way. Or maybe it was just _super_ pissed.

Somehow he managed to pull out his phone in the middle of a zigzag, checked the time. Another three minutes? Two? Like Danny was ever freaking on time for anything in his half-life. “Call Danny!” He yelled. 

The phone showed him a profile pic of Danielle and Tucker cosplaying at last year’s nerd-con. “Calling ‘DANI’…”

“Wrong one stupid clone-racist phone! CALL _DANNY_!”

“Calling ‘DADDY…’“

“How the fuck even?!” 

_Technology you’ve failed me. I’ve shown you nothing but allegedly obsessive love and you do me like that._

The ghost’s glow cast behind him warned Tucker just in time to skid beneath a low-branch and let it ram into the tree instead. Wood crunched and he shuddered thinking of being chewed and ground down to the bone between those teeth.

It was okay, the plan was going great. He was still alive, stalling for time. Danny would get here, follow the sound of ghostly roars and Tucker’s manly not-panicking screams, thermos the worm, then grab some nice post-hunt midnight bro-grub and crack jokes about how Tucker almost got eaten by-

Something snagged his ankle, cutting Tucker’s speed from 'adrenaline-fueled' to 'face-meets-ground' with gravity speed. Screw you too, physics.

He managed to throw up his arms in time to shield his face. Pain lanced up his forearm and burned scraps into his palms. His glasses where askew, the world gone crooked and blurred. He twisted around to follow the cold, wet sensation on his leg as he was dragged through a bed of dead leaves. 

A long, slick glowing tendril coming from the ghost’s mouth pulled him closer and closer into its waiting maw. The hum turned into hungry, gleeful gurgles. 

Oh. This was. This was not in the plan. 

Tucker dug his raw hands into the ground, dragging fistfuls of leaves and wet dirt. The light from his phone screen was just an arms length ahead, pulling away, no matter how much he kicked and scrambled and tried to pull himself forward. He thought there’d be more screaming and babbling on his end. Instead he was focusing every molecule of air on breathing, trying to get his crappy body Sam used for workout fodder to _fight_ , stop that grinding progress towards it. 

He was close enough to kick it, watch its expectant slobber dribble on his ripped cargo pants. Stupidly, he adjusted his glasses; got a nice, non-blurry view of that garbage disposal mouth, a hungry pit lined with thumb-sized teeth he could reach up and touch.

Tucker’s entire life, the whole of him, boiled down to this. He always figured his last thoughts would be of his mom, crammed between Sam and Danny on his too-small bed binging bad anime, the way Ingrid bit her lip nervously before she decided to give him his first kiss.

Instead, he just swallowed and said: “Oh Grandmother, what big teeth you have.”

Jesus, good thing no one was around to hear that. 

**“LASU LIN IRI!”**

A furious howl tore through the trees - a wrecking ball of black and green slammed into the side of the ghost-worm. It reared up and shrieked with pain, the tendril around Tucker’s ankle somehow slack and severed.

The smart thing would be to move. Tucker numbly continued to sit there, jaw hanging as his rescuer clung to the side of the ghost-worm and tore into it with massive claws. 

_“Wulf?”_

The ghost-worm bucked and wiggled, then body-slammed itself into the ground, forcing Wulf to leap off and land on all fours. His eyes were solid green and burning, snarling something in ghost Tucker couldn’t catch. They went at each other, tearing the small forest around them apart. The worm’s hide was pierced and bleeding in a dozen places, but it had desperation and a metric fuckton of bulk to throw around. 

Wulf took cover in the trees, leaping from branch to branch, constantly circling and taking advantage of every opportunity to claw at its blind spots (how did it see though? did it even have eyes where the hell were its _eyes_?). Tucker realized his mistake when it dawned on him how much energy Wulf was wasting trying to keep that thing’s attention off of him, how Wulf was trying to protect him. 

The worm must have realized it at the same time. Tucker saw it coming, tried to yell and warn him, but it came too fast. Wulf was blindsided by the worm’s tail end, flew and hit the trunk of a tree and went down hard. Pulled himself up with strain shaking his shoulders. 

The worm let out a skree of victory and hurled itself towards Wulf. Faster than Tucker could shout, he saved himself by slicing open a portal into solid air and diving in just before the worm hit, flattening itself and splintering the tree like a brittle toothpick.

It rolled and flopped on the ground, like it was having some kind of tantrum. Pulling itself back up, its mouth-head swiveled around, searching for some sign of Wulf, until it settled back on Tucker.

“Don’t look at me, _I_ don’t know where he went.” 

A muffled, tearing noise came from somewhere in the worm’s middle.

“Nevermind.”

Wulf _burst_ out of worm’s midsection claws first with a howl, an explosion like a sledgehammer to a watermelon that splattered Tucker and everything in sight with green. The worm didn’t even have any breath left inside, much less insides at all, to even make a dying noise as it fell over like a deflated hose. 

Panting, splattered with goopy green chunks on his claws and in his fur, Wulf stood in the clearing and panted hard. His eyes were still narrowed and dangerous, ears flat against his big head and hackles raised. Tucker had forgotten how _big_ he was, half again as tall with enough shoulder width and muscle that would have brought Dax Baxter to weep impotent tears. 

“Uh…Wulf? You okay buddy? _Amiko_?”

Wulf’s ears shot up, the hunch in his shoulders straightening as he spun around to look at Tucker with huge, concerned eyes. “Amiko Tuck!”

He dove at him, predator fast, and before Tucker could even flinch Wulf’s huge paws picked up Tucker and held him at Wulf’s eye-level. “Ĉu vi estas bone? Ĉu ĝi vundis vin?” His muzzle scrunched adorably as he sniffed Tucker up and down.

“Ah-ah!, that tickles! Haha- okay okay I’m fine, man. Ne…ne- nenio estas rompita.” He smiled with a split lip. “Danke al vi.”

“Sed,” A paw easily braceleted around Tucker’s wrist. “Viaj manoj…”

“Just a scrape man, really,” Tucker assured him. “It could have been- would have been a hell of a lot worse.”

Wulf’s left ear flicked, then looked pointedly at Tucker’s hands. Shaking like leaves in Wulf’s grip. It hurt his palms for Tucker to clench his fist, but it stopped the worst of the shakes. There was nothing he could do to stop the shaking in his heart, how hyperaware he was of his own pulse, the distant but twinging pain in arm, his ankle. The pressure behind his eyes. 

“Please don’t tell Danny and Sam?” He asked, voice a little weaker. “I-I don’t want them to know how close it was. They’d only get worried.”

“Por bona kialo,” Wulf reprimanded him gently.

“Please? Bonvolu?”

It was funny to see a wolf’s brow furrow with deep thoughts, until finally Wulf hugged Tucker tight to his chest. A giant, fuzzy, protective barrier he could wrap his arms around. 

“Thanks Wulf, you’re the best.”

“I know,” he managed, then touched his big, wet nose Tucker’s.

Heat flooded his face. “Oh my God did you just give me a dog-kiss? Is that a thing you just did?”

“ _Not_ dog,” Wulf corrected him. “ _Lupo_.”

“You are missing the point of-”

“Tucker!” A voice dropped in from the sky.

Of course this is when Danny would get here. This is his life, this is what he deserves.

Danny floated above the torn up ground and pulverized trees and gaped at the slowly melting leftovers of the ghost-worm. “What the hell- what is Wulf doing here?”

Tucker crossed his arms across and played up snuggling against Wulf’s ghost-hoodie. Not like they weren’t both covered in worm-goop anyways. “Lucky for me you’re not the only ghost-friend I have and this one is both cuddlier and more reliable.”

“I thought I told you to sit tight until I got here!”

“An innocent midnight jogger with bad judgement and possibly insomnia was in danger. What was I supposed to do, ask it to hold up until the _real_ hero showed up?”

That seemed to cut off whatever else Danny was planning to say. “I. There was- yeah okay that’s fair. Good work, Tuck.”

Wulf and Tucker cleared their throats. 

“Both of you. Thanks for having Tucker’s back, Wulf.”

Wulf shrugged, “Ne dankinde. Tucker havis ĝin sub kontrolo.”

“I’m…going to assume that means ‘you’re welcome.’“

“Dude,” Tucker said. “Duolingo. Esperanto ain’t that hard.”

“Iz not _English_.” Wulf rolled his eyes.

Tucker laughed at the smug look on Wulf’s face. 

“Well you two look thoroughly disgusting,” Danny said. “Want to skip the traditional after-hunt bro-snack and get you home to get cleaned up?”

“Hell no,” Tucker said mutinously. “Wulf and I can go back to the apartment to get cleaned, you can pick up some burgers for all three of us for being late.”

Wulf’s tail swished away some stray leaves behind him “Burgers?”

Danny blanched at the thought of paying for enough food to satisfy two grown men and a giant werewolf-ghost, but between Tucker’s guilt-trip look and Wulf’s puppy eyes, he sighed. “Okay, okay fine, I’ve got food duty. But he stays in your room until you two get that crap off you. I don’t want the whole apartment smelling like double-dead worm monster and wet dog.”

“ _Lupo_ ,” They said together. Wulf’s ears perked and he grinned at Tucker with a mouthful of fangs. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tucker grows up as a person and Wulf is best cuddly murderghost friend and no one will ever convince me otherwise.


End file.
